‘Soft Skills’ Are Driving the Digital Workplace

May 22, 2016

6:00 pm

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Is there an organization that doesn’t rely on technology to make the entire workplace more efficient? Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past decades, you know that every business needs the support of technology. As any other smart business owner, you probably supply the offices with the gadgets your employees need, so they can take care of their tasks effectively. You also ask them to use different apps, social media networks, and specific programs developed in accordance with the needs of the organization.

Still, you might notice that no matter how much you try for your employees to gain technical skills, your projects are failing and you cannot transform your business into a digital organization as easily as you anticipated. Do you know what the problem is? Your employees lack so-called “soft skills”. When you focus on their development, the workers will understand what you’re trying to achieve with the technology advancements, and they will make sure to respond to your expectations.

Here are some of the most important soft skills you need your employees to develop:

Teamwork Skills

Remember: a team within the organization reflects its culture as a whole. When you equip each employee with a computer and you explain that most of the communication within the team will be digitalized, the team spirit in the organization may suffer. The level of collaboration between your employees has to remain superb regardless of the number of technology tools and apps they use.

Big organizations have collaboration software, which connects the employees. They have established great cooperative culture, which inspires everyone to make individual contributions into the projects. If, for example, your employees use team collaboration tools such as Dropbox, Google Hangouts, Google Docs, Confluence, or Asana, you need to make them comfortable to share what they know instead of waiting for the more skillful members of the team to take most of the workload.

Working Towards the Organizational Goals

When you notice that the goals you’re striving for are far from being reached although you’ve done your best to provide the employees with access to ultimate technology, then the reason for that might be simple: they don’t understand how going digital drives the business forward. You need to encourage goal-centric thinking by explaining how each new tool you introduce makes them more efficient in the job and brings your organization ahead of the competition.

Otherwise, your employees will be discouraged by new gadgets, software, and tools, since they will only think about the efforts they have to invest in order to learn how to use them. You need to bring their focus on the goals, so they will be eager to adopt the technology you introduce.

Problem-Solving Skills

What if the system crashes? What if some members of the team don’t know how to use a particular tool? How are the rest of the team members going to solve the problem? When you make the organization dependent upon technology, you have to keep in mind that the tools and workers are not going to be 100 percent reliable, 100 percent of the time.

In addition to teaching your employees how to use technology, you need to help them develop some troubleshooting skills as well. The least you can expect is an ability to describe the problem to the IT department with clear, specific terms.

Open-Mindedness

What do you mean when you say that an employee is open-minded? The first thing that comes to mind is their capacity to understand the colleagues and customers, and respect their culture and opinions. However, open-mindedness also involves enthusiasm for learning new things, and that’s the personal trait that distinguishes great employees from the crowd. Successful organizations are driven by open-minded teams and individuals, who are always ready to accept the latest technology and turn it into the greatest advantage of the business.

You can’t achieve such a climate within the organization if you don’t take it into consideration during the recruiting process. However, there is still something you can do with the team you currently have: offer constant support and show your own enthusiasm for learning. Make sure everyone gets some fun during the training and adoption processes.

It doesn’t matter how much you invest in technology if your employees aren’t ready for it. Their soft skills determine your chances for success. Keep that in mind when you wonder why the latest tool didn’t help you achieve the expected results.

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John Anderson is a personal coach. He knows that the main key of success is work and discipline. Aside from coaching activity John is working on development of several digital projects. One of them is essay writing service Scholar Advisor. It helps understand modern trends in education.